On Saturday England kick-off their Euro 2016 campaign against Russia in Marseille which must mean the biennial post-mortem into why English football cannot punch its weight globally is fast approaching.

The gulf in wealth between the Premier League and the rest of world football is as embarrassing as it is obscene when you consider what the national side has to show for it.

English football continues to import overseas footballers at a prodigious rate. How much of that is the cause and how much the effect of producing so little home-grown talent will be high on the agenda of the imminent debates from pubs to television studios the country over. At its heart, though, is a chronic shortage of quality coaches.

When Football Association Greg Dyke launched his crusade to reform English football in 2013, he noted Spain had 2,140 Uefa Pro-Licenced coaches, Germany more than 1,000. England had 203.

Unfortunately, English football has always had a slightly ambivalent attitude towards coaching. Rory Smith’s new book,

Mister, looks at the Englishmen forced to move abroad to teach skills their own country apparently did not want to learn. “It is,” he writes, “a story of how England taught the world and forgot to learn”.

It was the late 1920s when former Newcastle United and England centre-forward Billy Hibbert said, “There is no room for me here. Our young players prefer not to be taught” as he left to coach in the United States of America, then Spain. Nearly a century on, coaching is still under-regarded in this country.

In telling their stories, Smith classifies Hibbert and co as mavericks and missionaries but collectively he calls them “Misters”. That it is a word still prevalent in Portugal, Argentina and Brazil shows the influence England once had on coaching the world – much of it came from the North East.

They may or may not win this summer’s tournament, but Spain are football’s world leaders when it comes to technical ability, their league the planet’s finest. There was a time when blood and thunder football was the norm even there. Smith puts much of the credit for changing that at the door of Fred Pentland, an inside forward who caught the coaching bug as he wound down his career in Middlesbrough’s reserves, and Jack Greenwell, perhaps Barcelona’s longest-serving manager.

Jack Greenwell (right)

Smith does his best to wade through the fog of Greenwell’s career.

The miner’s son was a versatile sportsman – in Spain he also coached boxing and competed at the national tennis championships aged 43 – who mainly played left-half for his local amateur side Crook Town after making his Northern League debut as a 17-year-old.

In 1912 Greenwell left to play for Barcelona. How he ended up there is unclear. He guested for West Auckland Wanderers in the 1909 Sir Thomas Lipton Trophy (forerunner to the World Cup) in Turin, and may have been part of one or more of the many amateur sides to play in the Catalan capital in the early 20th Century, though Crook and West Auckland only came out later.

Another Englishman, John Barrow, is officially Barcelona’s first full-time coach, sacked in 1917 after a few months when “wine was his best and only objective” and succeeded by Greenwell, but Smith questions whether Barrow even existed. His name is not mentioned until the 1920s and the change of management was not reported by

Mundo Deportivo or La Vanguardia, yet there are records of Greenwell’s 12,000-peseta manager’s salary in March 1917.

Greenwell had been referred to as Barcelona’s “

entrenador” (coach) as early as 1913, and Smith believes this was the start of a ten-year spell in charge, perhaps initially as a player-coach who picked the team. Johann Cruyff was only manager for eight. Smith believes Barrow may have been the mysterious Barren, Baron or Barzon, and coached before Jack Alderson’s month-long stint before becoming Newcastle’s goalkeeper in 1913.

Alderson’s former Crook team-mate Greenwell was in it for the long haul, winning the Copa del Rey in 1920 and 1922, and four Catalan titles between 1919 and 1922 before Spain had a national league. “His physical training was ahead of its time,” Smith explains. He played an English-style formation with an attacking attitude. At one point Barcelona had 35 forwards and only 14 defenders.

Greenwell left in 1923 to manage UE Sants, Castellon, Espanyol – where he won the 1928 Catalan championship and beat Real Madrid in the final Copa del Rey before La Liga was formed – and Real Mallorca.

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When Barcelona suffered consecutive title defeats to Pentland’s Athletic Bilbao, Greenwell returned to Barcelona for two more years, winning another Catalan championship, before joining Valencia, then Sporting Gijon. Valencia called him “one of the best coaches there is in Spain,” Gijon “one of the most popular” but the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 brought Greenwell home.

An English newspaper report made it clear he was looking for work – “he has lost everything” – but even with his cv, his homeland did not want to know.

As Pentland, who had won four Copa del Reys in Bilbao, one with Real Irun, and who was Spain’s assistant coach when they beat England in 1929 noted, English clubs “would rather pay £3,000 for a new player than pay a coach £500 to churn out many first-teamers.”

As Smith says of the Misters, “they had only ever worked aborad and that, as everyone knew, did not count.”

Instead Greenwell managed Peru to victory at the 1928 Bolivian Games, then a year later became the only European manager to win the Copa America. He was working in Colombia when the heart trouble he suffered for at least 11 years killed him in November 1942. It took until February for his death to be reported in Europe, and Spain paid far more attention than England.

It was a similar story for Randolph Galloway, born into poverty in Sunderland in 1896. He coached Sporting Gijon, Valencia (where Greenwell replaced him) and Racing Santander before the Civil War forced him home too. Having seemingly coached no higher than youth level until the end of World War Two, he continued his travels in Costa Rica, Uruguay, Switzerland and Portugal. Between them, Galloway and former Sunderland and Carlisle United inside forward Bob Kelly led Sporting Lisbon to four of the club’s seven league titles in eight post-war seasons.

By then, the FA were encouraging coaches to spread the word, but there was little attempt to learn from them and continental football was growing increasingly suspicious of Brits abroad. Between Welshman John Charles’ final game for Juventus in 1962 and Kevin Keegan’s first for Hamburg in 1977, there had barely been a success story to speak of on the field. Even seven European Cups in eight years for English teams between 1977 and 1984 did not change attitudes. By the time of Heysel in 1985, Smith says Europe “had long since decided it had nothing left to learn; or rather, that England had nothing left to teach.”

There were exceptions. In 1969 Barcelona chose Vic Buckingham as manager over a brash 34-year-old from Middlesbrough called Brian Clough. Langley Park-born Bobby Robson, who played for Buckingham at Fulham and West Bromwich Albion, turned Barca down in 1982 but suggested “a young, thinking, English coach” named Terry Venables instead. Two years later, they remembered the name. In 1987, when Athletic Bilbao’s general manager Fernando Ochoa approached Liverpool about Kenny Dalglish, the club’s canny chief executive Peter Robinson instead recommended the manager of the Reds’ main rivals, Everton – Ryton’s Howard Kendall. He held the job for two years.

Generally, though, the Misters went abroad to build or restore reputations.

Robson was an embattled England manager when he doubled his pay packet by agreeing to join PSV Eindhoven, even if the subsequent 1990 World Cup allowed him to leave on a high.

He was sacked at PSV and Sporting Lisbon because he failed to match domestic success in Europe and even at Barcelona Robson got a raw deal.

In his debut season, 1996-7, he was voted European manager of the year after winning the Spanish Super Cup, European Cup Winners’ Cup and Copa del Rey, but his predecessor Cruyff – “the ghost in the machine” – criticised his style and he was shoved upstairs to be replaced by Louis van Gaal. “No Barcelona coach has ever been the victim of such fierce, unjustified and indiscriminate criticism as Bobby Robson”, wrote Alberto Turro in La Vanguardia.

Despite that, Robson’s sense of loyalty to the club delayed his boyhood dream of managing Newcastle until after another stint in Eindhoven.

Since Robson the likes of Steve McClaren and David Moyes have sought sanctuary on the continent, while Gary Neville thought there would be less prying English eyes if he cut his managerial teeth at Valencia. Former Darlington manager Dave Booth is coaching Laos club Lanexang United after spells in India, Brunei, Cambodia, Burma, the Maldives, Thailand and Cambodia. Without having played professional football and not 30 until next month, Ian Cathro made his name in Spain, not Scotland, before McClaren brought him onto Newcastle’s coaching staff last summer.

Howard Kendall (Image: PA Wire)

Too many of those who have gone abroad, though, have never been welcomed back. Even the Mister who will manage England at Euro 2016, former Inter Milan, Switzerland and Finland coach Roy Hodgson, who wrote the foreword, had to prove his worth with Buckingham and Robson’s old clubs before being appointed national team manager.

Sunderland’s Sam Allardyce will often complain that English managers are not seen as “sexy” enough alongside their foreign counterparts. More importantly, not enough at grass roots level in England see coaching as something they want to do. Until that changes, those at the top will continue to have a shortage of talent to work with.

You can bet your last penny that at some point in the next few weeks Chris Waddle – the one-time Tow Law Town winger who went to Marseille to expand his playing horizons – will launch into a passionate, pinpoint tirade about how English youngsters are not taught the techniques they need to prosper at international tournaments. Have his former clubs Newcastle or Sunderland ever thought about asking him to put his ideas into practice?

It is about time English football started making better use of its footballing adventurers.